onfocus

There was a great sunset here on Wednesday.

Just thinking out loud about RSS Aggregators... If every RSS client was also a server, we could have a distributed solution to the brute-force problem. I'd gladly serve up others' feeds if it meant less drain on my server. For example, let's say I subscribe to the NYT Business feed. My RSS client needs a local copy to display the feed. In a perfect world I could also give my copy to others on demand. When someone requests my onfocus feed, they could send a list of other feeds they're interested in. If they're also interested in the NYT Business feed and I have a copy that's newer than theirs, I could send that RSS along with my onfocus RSS. You wouldn't always get the authoratative copy, but you could get close without too many hops; similar to DNS. Some feeds really do update every 10 minutes, and you'd need to grab those directly. But for most weblog RSS feeds, a P2P ripple effect like this would probably be fine.

My server is under attack by RSS aggregators! They eat bandwidth and resources at four times the rate of regular viewing mortals like you and me. I love RSS, don't get me wrong. But the current crop of brute-force aggregators is really driving me crazy. (Amphetadesk and Netnewswire seem to be the worst offenders, but they may simply be the most popular.) Some stop by as often as every ten minutes without so much as identifying themselves. It's just rude to make so many requests. Aggregator authors could create polite software very simply: use conditional HTTP gets. The aggregator sends the last time they've seen the feed along with each request. And my server politely says, "no, it's the same one you have. 304." Or "yes, it has changed since your version, here you go. 200." It's much more civilized than, "gimmie! gimmie! gimmie! 200! 200! 200!" The other alternative is to set up a centralized ping-server where RSS authors can let every aggregator on earth know that their feed has changed recently. (like weblogs.com.) It's not as elegant or scalable as conditional HTTP gets, but it would be better than our current state of RSS anarchy. As it is, I'm going to have to write some sort of filter to slow them down.

It's about that time to start thinking about sxsw again. That means sxswBlog is go! It's new AND improved this year with a new design and lots of trackback goodness. check it out.

It's pouring down rain and thundering here in the north bay. Thunder is an odd sound for this area. It's not the infinite rumble or violent cracks of the Nebraska storms I grew up with. It's more like a constipated growl.

If you like to play around with Windows Scripting you might get a kick out of The Scriptomatic Tool: "Why do some system administrators get fancy cars, yachts, and Rolex watches? It's because they know how to write WMI scripts, and you don't!" It's an easy way to learn about all of the WMI classes, and what information you can get at. Fun stuff. I need to look into Hypertext Applications (.hta files) for writing simple client apps.

service note: onfocus mail may be a bit wacky as the mx fairies work their magic across dns land. my hotmail account will still work. Though my hotmail account is next to useless these days. I'm pretty sure some black-arts spam manual mentions my address specifically, "callibrate your spam cannon by pointing it at this hotmail address first."

I can't wait to vote tomorrow!

Punch Drunk Love was terrible. Not terrible in a I-expected-wacky-Adam-Sandler-and-didn't-get-it sort of way, but terrible in a pretentious-misogynistic-waste-of-talent-and-worse-my-time sort of way. It's just another in a series of unimaginative fear everyone movies like One Hour Photo. And this one was mean-spirited.

Anil's discovery about We Blog related comments spam is just another reason why better identity management is needed for open weblog comment systems. Beyond an identity bank like I mentioned a few days ago, I think there are some other steps weblog authors could take to weed out unwanted comments. First, create a quick "terms of posting" that lets people know what is acceptable and what isn't...and publish it where people will see it before they post. Also, enforce consequences for violating the terms. I'm not sure what that should be. Maybe making the IP Address of the offending poster public (this is like putting up bad checks at your local food joint) would help. Blocking that address (or range of addresses) from future posting could be the way to go, though it's trickier with large ISPs. I think the real key is heavy moderation. As soon as someone violates the terms, delete the comment; no note that you've changed something, no email to the offender, just delete. The idea is that trolls and spammers will get bored when no one listens. (But we all know how well that works for email.) These aren't long-term solutions, but they could help while the ratio of unwanted contributors to good contributors is still low.